


frogs are our friends

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:49:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for ephermeralk, a meme fill: J2 Lab Partners AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	frogs are our friends

(Later, Jensen will remember the first few weeks of college thus.)

Out here the rooms are large and bright, wood and glass, and Jensen’s footfalls echo like the choral ode to some impending tragedy as he drags himself from class to class. Everything is bright: too open, too green, too gray. The overcast sky drizzles with icicles, each of them like thin sharp needles. When he looks up, trying to find a watery sun playing peekaboo, they catch in his lashes and make him temporarily blind. There’s a moment of deep, crawling horror, a sliver of strange panic.

 

And then he blinks and it’s gone.

 

Everything is too quiet, hushed as if Jensen’s come into a cathedral and not to a college campus. He walks too fast, everywhere, searching for something he can’t name. Some other country maybe. Some other landscape. He sits through lectures on Euripides and Xenophon, drowning amongst incomprehensible words of long-dead men, and doodles angsty clouds on the margins of his notebooks. He rushes out when classes are done, as though they suck the life out of him, wincing when ice and twigs crack beneath his feet like thin, broken bones. He feels like a freight train with its break lines cut loose. (Later, when he’s pinned down like a frog in the lab with the thrill of knowing anyone could do anything to him, he’ll be incredibly fucking glad of it.) He feels breathless. Sometimes, he thinks, he couldn’t tell you what he’s running from, or what he’s running to.

 

And he fucks. With a thousand other things gated behind his teeth, he talks boys into pub nights, club nights, walk-in-the-graveyard nights. Rich kids want to experiment, and hey, if one’s already in prison, might as well keep committing the crime. Various things help: that he’s new, that he has an accent, that prior to the clusterfuck that landed him here, he’d spent a sunny summer in California getting a tan that was so rare here. It’s six in the morning and the campus is dusted with early morning frost when he wakes up in someone’s bed and walks back to his dorm. He passes the chapel with a one-fingered salute, last night’s bruises still fading on his wrists, and wishes that his father could see him now.

 

Jensen wonders what his Psychology course would say about that: the psychoanalysis of a sort of revenge no can see.

 

Today he cuts his finger on paper and the blood that wells is the brightest thing in the room. It goes pink swirling down the drain and Jensen sticks his finger in his mouth, grimacing at the salt-iron taste.

 

“Penance by paper-cut,” he tells the beautiful boy by his side, indicating the minuscule body parts strewn beneath the microscopes. It’s their first lab class. Jensen doesn’t even know his name, except that it starts with a J too. The karma of alphabetical conformity brought them here. Jensen flips the first page of the boy’s notebook and finds his initials scrawled in a wide, looping hand up top: JP.

 

Jensen’s seen him around. First at matriculation dinner, flipping pennies into wine glasses. Then in the halls sometimes, always going somewhere or the other. He majors in Biology, fills a Humanities requirement with the same class that Jensen’s in: Greek Tragedy. Takes photographs on the side. ( Ambrotypes, he’ll tell Jensen later; civil war type photographs made with an old Cyclopean camera and varnish plates in dark rooms. The kind that leaves silver stains on your fingers. Later, he’ll bring in that camera and set up a shoot, and Jensen will smile till it actually hurts, holding a pose, and he wouldn’t mind at all. It will come out looking like the attic-found pictures of a zoned-out soldier, or a lost, lovesick immigrant.)

 

That first day, they crucify a frog. And when it thaws enough to writhe faintly on the table, they stab it and watch it die, quiet together, like a blood-pact binds their souls.

 

This is what Jensen finds out about JP in the next few days: that he wears a stopped watch and can’t sit still. That he runs his scalpel along the soft underbellies of amphibians with the precision of a laser beam, keeping up a steady, clinical commentary that Jensen can never tell apart from sarcasm. That his eyes are all sorts of strange colors and he’s skinny, and he smiles with a scary sort of energy, as if to compensate for that fact that he doesn’t talk much. That he reads a lot of books and thrives on fast-food. That his first name is Jared, his second name just European enough for Jensen to trip all over its spelling. That he spends a lot of time in labs and classrooms, pinning things down in artful dissection. That he’s probably too strange—after all, most of his weird ambrotypes are of the same kind: dead things.

 

(Jensen wonders what his Psychology course would say about  that : where arranging dead things like a  tableau vivant  fit in on Manslow’s Theory of Needs.)

 

That Jared wishes he could sleep more.

 

“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”

 

“Get chips at the Doomsday Van,” Jared says. He’s reading a comic book under their desk. It’s something that seems altogether too normal for him, this boy who hangs out amidst glass jars and dead things. Jensen pegged him for more of a Sylvia Plath type, his external life a placebo, stand-in for whatever it was that went on in his head. But here it is: a splinter in his brain, a swerve that makes him understandable. Comics. There’s an explosion on the page Jared’s on.  BOOM,  in psychedelic colors. Jared’s stopped watch also has a cracked dial. A single crack that runs vertical to his wrist. Jensen’s been thinking about that watch. And the hand that wears it. Mostly when there’s fire beneath his bones and a different hand on his dick.

 

“How often can you not sleep at all?” Jensen asks, clinically.

 

That gets a raised eyebrow. “Most nights.” Jared says. He turns the page. A woman in a veil is punching a robot in this one.  KA-POW. 

 

Jensen breathes in.  “You wanna get chips tonight?”

 

In answer, Jared stabs his scalpel through the dead frog’s shriveling heart, and offers it to Jensen. Jensen folds it in the palm of his hand, precious ruby thing, and takes that for a yes.

 

 


End file.
